I’ve found myself becoming increasingly impatient with Che-cultists.  Maybe it’s just me, but a group of people who would support a brutal, tyrannical, illiberal thug just don’t earn a helluva lot of brownie points in my eyes. 

I can remember once seeing one of those fellows with a Guevara t-shirt going through airport security, and thinking of the irony of the whole scene.  And I can once remember laughing at the claims of a Marxist/Lennonist candidate in a recent political forum ( yes, we have those in Canada ), that Cuba should be pointed to as a working model of what a country should be. 

Guevara fever, in other words.  One more failed principle; one more failed figure; one more failed movement, on behalf of Leftism.  And yet, one still clung to grimly by those on the far-Left of the spectrum.

And so I don’t have a particularly high opinion of Che-cultists.

Nor does Paul Berman, in Slate magazine.  This article is a bit dated, and forgive me for reproducing some of its contents, but I thought it worth the read:

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own.

I do not know why people would seek to idolise such an individual.  Perhaps it is because of a failure on their part to understand how little regard he truly had for the lives and freedom of those under and around him.  Perhaps it is because they do not even care in the end, so consumed are they with the ideal of the Revolution.

Regardless, the worshippers of a faux revolutionary exist, and they continue to illegitimise the true meaning of revolution, of true freedom-fighting behavior.  There is a fine line between revolutionary and terrorist.  Guevara crossed that line. 

And I wonder if it is that same ill-recognised line which we have failed to distinguish in regards to certain Islamic terrorists, whose aims we have dignified with some sort of goal of freedom. 

And in the end, if we fail to recognise the true meaning of revolution, will we be able to recognise the need for it, should the time ever come?  For even that line has been blurred to the extent that some call for revolution for no other reason than an over-extension of the capitolist system; easily curtailed, and not deserving of the moniker of fascist. 

I’m sorry, but I have to call the anarchists on this one.  I know, I know, I’m a libertarian, and the two idealogies can be quite similar at times; but it seems that the majority of the anarchist movement has failed in regards to the concept of revolution.  They no longer know what it means, or why it should be brought about, and it is this removal from reality which is the ultimate demise of the credibility of the anarchist movement. 

I’ll end this brief little rant with two things.  First of all, I’ll end with a link, found with the help of the Cuba Archive,  listing people who have died as a result of Che Guevara and his practices.  The list is not all-comprehensive, but it’s a grim reminder of how those who idolize Guevara are worshipping a man who is a poignant example of what a failed revolutionary looks like.     

Second of all, I’ll post a poem, found in the above article by Paul Berman, which was written by Raul Rivero:

Search Order
by Raúl Rivero

What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?

What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I’ve written
the words “ambition,” “lightness,” and “brittle”?

What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?

How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?

Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?

Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.

They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
“Castles with music box. I won’t let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie.”

A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.

Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.

If any revolution should come about, I would hope that those who idolise Che Guevara will not be at the head of it.  And nor will they be; because if you do not understand revolution, then you will not be the ones to bring it about.